Microsoft® Exchange® is widely used e-mail solution at present. In times of disaster (natural, manmade, etc.), e-mail is considered an extremely critical application required for businesses to maintain continuity and consistent communication with associates, customers and vendors.
At present, there exist multiple approaches for improving not only the availability of an exchange gateway during a disaster but also aimed at maintaining continuity and consistent communication between an entity and its associates, customers and business partners.
The most common approaches/examples include the following:
a. Software solutions have been developed by ISVs that enable Microsoft Exchange mail stores and/or exchange server storage to be replicated to secondary/failover exchange mail stores and/or server(s).
b. Hardware appliances providing highly available instances of Exchange have been created. During replication of Exchange stores from a production appliance to a standby appliance, the appliances can maintain a “clean” instance of Exchange and its mail store(s) by silencing the production instance of Exchange. This significantly reduces the risk of corrupting the mail store(s) for both the production and secondary appliance Exchange instance(s).
c. Storage vendors have established block-level replication between homogeneous storage solutions that are connected to Exchange servers. The storage vendors can control both read and write functions to the drives, for both production and secondary servers. This allows the storage vendor to control when reads and writes are occurring to storage at the disk block level, minimizing risk of low level corruption of data.
As with other database driven applications, Exchange data can be replicated as a whole by software solutions through granular low level data or by block level replication. However, resource contention issues with databases that are actively in use sometimes render low level replication ineffectiveness and can result in corrupted data store copies.
Software replication solutions are based upon the premise of establishing a one-to-one copy from production, to a backup or a failover instance. Establishing a one-to-one relationship of production to backup instance makes it inherently difficult to implement a managed services approach to exchange replication that is both cost effective for smaller businesses and not overly complex.
Hardware based storage replication solutions are tightly coupled to the selected storage vendor. These solutions are possible for large organizations, with sufficient staff and consistently implemented technical solutions/standards, but are costly to implement and maintain over longer time. These solutions are quite beneficial for the hardware vendors, but not to customers, as they result in continued lock-in of the customer through the establishment of a high cost barrier to entry for competitors.
Existing software and hardware replication solutions for Microsoft Exchange include: (Neverfail™) Neverfail for Exchange, (NSI™) Doubletake, (XOSoft™) WanSync for Exchange, (Veritas™) Global Cluster Manager, (Mimosa Systems™) NearPoint, (Cemaphore™) MailShadow and (Azaleos™) OneServer “Exchange Appliance”.
Certain other present technologies are discussed. EMC Legato EmailXtender™ provides customers with a solution for archiving emails from Exchange servers to improve production mail store performance and reduced storage costs. A related product from Legato called the EmailXaminer™, provides support for inspection of corporate e-mail to verify policies are being maintained for regulatory compliance purposes.
MailShadow™, created by Cemaphore, replicates locally all MAPI transactions that occur to/from Exchange servers. Then, its proprietary formatting is used to compress the transactions and transmit them to a remote instance of Exchange, where the messages are uncompressed and consolidated into one Exchange data store instance for recovery purposes. This solution results in the consolidation of N server instances down to one instance, on a company's WAN that can be used for disaster recovery purposes.
Azaleos™ has an offering in the form of an appliance type solution called the OneServer Exchange Appliance. Azaleos offers a managed service, called OneStop™, for outsourced 24×7 monitoring and a remote support of OneServer appliances. Azaleos™ also offers a configuration called Full Fidelity Disaster Recovery for Exchange that allows for replication between two OneServer appliances for disaster recovery purposes.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,085,286 to Dias, et al. discloses a method for communication between two different and separate business entities which utilize a different communication protocol.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,072,933 to Lamb, et al., focuses on achieving network access control by using a network address translation protocol. Lamb places a gateway between the LAN/computer and the internet, which allows for content filtering by a technology known as “proxy server” or “application level gateway”.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,080,161 to Leddy, et al., describes routing of information, through an Exchange. Ledi focuses on the integration between network architectures and protocols for supporting enhancements in the decision making processes in context of standard routing protocols.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,106,722 to Kuster, et al. discloses a system for address information exchange between media gateways. Kuster focuses on providing for a direct, per call address information exchange, between two distinct IP Media Exchange Gateways.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,054,264 to Mor discloses a communication device for interconnection between two Networks.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,034,963 to Minami, et al. discloses a multiple network protocol encoder/decoder and data processor.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,751,677 to Ilnicki, et al. discloses a method and apparatus for allowing a secure and transparent communication between a user device and servers of a data access network system, via a firewall and a gateway.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,700,967 to Kleinoder, et al. discloses a presence information method and system.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,101,320 to Schuetze, et al. discloses an electronic mail communication method and system for exchanging e-mail between organizations having dissimilar electronic mail systems.
EP Patent Application No. 1 509 033 A1 to Webel discloses methods and devices for connecting IP terminations and PSTN terminations.
The prior art cited above has bulky designs and time consuming methods. These have a general, mandatory requirement for the installation of a third party software or require the usage of proprietary storage hardware, on the exchange server for the purposes of replication of mail and communication of message storage.
Another notable drawback in the prior art is that the installation of a new hardware or software has an impact on the operation of the existing exchange solution which is available to an organization.
Furthermore, the prior art does not address the issues of providing an effective, simple and easy to operate exchange solution or, providing storage, chronological archiving and/or retrieval of e-mail messages. All these form an integral parameter for a secured offsite e-mail storage system for use in the event of any disaster.
Accordingly, there exists a need for providing a secure e-mail system for business continuity in the event of a disaster wherein the system is equipped to not only serve as an archiving source but also to ensure easy and prompt retrieval of archived information.
In view of the foregoing disadvantages inherent in the above-mentioned prior art, the general purpose of the present invention is: to provide an improved combination of convenience and utility, to include all the advantages of the prior art, to overcome the disadvantages/drawbacks of the prior art and to provide a secure e-mail system for businesses which is specific, quicker and efficient.